The Brooklyn Rail

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima is not a beach read. This book demands more. I stowed it away in my hospital bag and clutched it, white-knuckled, as we shuffled through triage. Craft was in the room when they placed my newborn son on my still-numb body. I cracked it open between failed attempts at nursing and after getting woken relentlessly for vital signs and pain meds. Lima’s words felt like a salve in those bleary moments. I couldn’t quite grasp the narrative, but that was the point. It was hard to know what was real and what was meta; what was the story spun by the writer and what was the writer being spun by the words. Sometimes, I too, seemed trapped inside the story, turned and turned.

The premise is simple. Once, back in her twenties, the writer slept with the Devil. Then, throughout the collection, he appears: in a crowded subway, in the fleeting expression of her boyfriend, and elsewhere in the writer’s own reflection. Lima doesn’t mince words. The Devil is magic. He lights cigarettes with flames emanating from his palms, he makes plants grow, and he invokes music that hasn’t yet been written. He hears her private thoughts. He awakens her desire—to write, and also to feel: “I felt like flowers were blossoming inside me, emanating from where he had touched.”

But there’s something more sinister at play here than a feminist awakening in the vein of Kate Chopin or Edith Wharton. Lima’s Devil insists that the two are kindred spirits in their shared yearning for meaning. “Stories, the Devil said. We both craved them.” And so, the book pivots to craft—to the futile desire to mimic the world around us on the page. And what are we to do if that world is splintered and haunted? What if we fear our own internal monologue? Lima’s narrator looks into the Devil’s eyes and realizes the two are eternally entangled: “I recognized some of what I’d been carrying inside, mirrored on his face.”

These stories, ranging from ghosts of the living to scathing reviews of writing workshops, from manspreading at the DMV to forays into cannibalism, were precisely what I needed after nursing my two-week-old in front of the news, where two old white male presidents were bickering about golf swings. Lima’s words seemed omnipresent then, embossed into my fear for my child’s inherited future. Lima’s Devil “wore an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and some bad foundation. I walked up to him and asked what he was, yelling over the music. He said he was the future.” In this less overt passage, and in other more explicit references, Lima tackles our political polarization, addressing both Trump in the West and his mirror image, the “Trump of the Tropics.” She ruminates on the passing of time and combats the contemporary ennui over what is yet to come.

Her words reverberate with their own exigence. The world in which Lima first drafted these stories was vastly different from the evolving reality into which the stories were birthed. As the characters fluctuate and morph into one another, themes intersect and compound. The effect is dizzying: from political angst to aging, from immigration to diversity hires, from overt racism to the labyrinth of craft. She draws a parallel between carrying an H1B work Visa and losing one’s identity in the American melting pot with gluttonous cannibalism: “I had American bones now. I’d thought I was the eater, but America had been eating me the whole time, from within.”

In “Antropófaga,” she treads at the boundary between miscarriages, “a silent loss,” and children separated from their families at the border, wrapped in aluminum foil. Mourning, she envisions her angel baby at different ages, thus revisiting motifs of passing time and aging: “She dreamed of her baby. In her dreams, they lay together under sheets of metallic plastic. They slept on their sides. She hugged her child, who was sometimes a baby, sometimes a toddler, sometimes a little five-year-old.”

Always, Lima circles back to the question of craft, ruminating on the sort of discourse we see weaponized on Twitter. In a metafictional excerpt of imagined critique feedback to one of her stories, a pedantic response reads: “I wonder if this is the author’s story to tell.” Elsewhere, the Devil intuits her fear:

The writer was also an immigrant. Sometimes, when the immigrant writer wrote, there was no migration in the story, and she wondered if there should be. Sometimes the immigrant writer wrote immigrant stories and wondered if she shouldn’t. These were the kind of questions she talked about with the Devil.

At its heart, this collection unwinds the tendrils of the rhetorical situation. With so many problems in the world, and so much noise, how do we begin to write? What is authenticity? Who can use which words? And why do we bury our loved ones in language? With so many ghosts in the ether, Lima insists on searching tirelessly for a future that remains unwritten, in “the telling and the words, the spaces between them.”